Sheet steel
Hi it's Tod at Tod's Workshop and Tod Cutler here and today we're going to
start messing around with arrows and my lock down longbow. I
have a bundle of arrows here that have come from Will Sherman of
Medieval Arrows, fantastic fletcher, a good bowman, but
a fantastic fletcher and arrow smith. First arrow we're going to be testing is
this one here, type 7 needle bodkin really from 12th
through to about the 14th century. Next one up; type 9 short bodkin,
really 14th, 15th even up into the beginning of the 16th century a little
bit. This one is an m2, so really
15th and 16th century. It's often known as a Towton or a Tudor bodkin.
And these last two are the classic type 16. The one
on your right is mild steel the one on your left is
wrought iron socket with hardened steel edges, barbs,
welded on. Half percent carbon or thereabouts. Good against flesh
sort of similar ones obviously used for hunting through the years, but these
very much were a military head. Now the interesting thing is, for all of the
arrowhead types that we've got there's very, very
little evidence of any of them being made or
of steel or using steel in their construction, except for type 16s.
That's interesting in its own right because they don't really look like
armor piercers to me, so what are they doing with steel in them?
So what the heck am i up to with these beautiful medieval arrows and this 10
year old rather dodgy Chinese compound crossbow?
Well it's really simple. I can't shoot a proper
heavyweight medieval longbow, but what i did do in the last film, is I established
that if i take an arrow of around about let's say
75, 80 grams and i shoot it out of this crossbow what i do is i get
the right kind of arrow speeds that an English longbowman would get.
So i'm getting around about 180 190 feet per second i don't know what that
is in Metric I'm sorry. If we look at these little clips here from Joe Gibbs's
films you can see that the Mary Rose bows are achieving these.
So my argument here, is if you take an arrow of the right length
and the right shape and the right materials and you propel it at the right
speed, the target doesn't know whether it's a
longbow or a crossbow that shot it: so what i can do
is i can cheat. And i can do my tests cheating
myself here without having to get loads of people in every time.
And what are we going to shoot in these films? Well we're going to try and shoot
pretty much everything; cuir bouilli, boiled leather
used to make armour out of that. Sheet steel.
Gambeson, they also use to put maille under it or over it, so we'll
have a look at that as well. Again thank you for correcting me, I
didn't realize there were these two in combination,
so we'll try that, find out what happens. Arming doublet, we'll try it with the maille
on top of that. Acketon, so this stuffed
cotton one; Again we'll give it a go see what it does.
And then of course we've got other ones that to look at like for instance what
happens if you've got your lovely planked poplar shield and your arm is
behind it, does the arrow go straight through that
and through your arm? And then of course there's that classic wonderful myth
that a longbow arrow goes through a three-inch (75mm) oak door.....
Well, let's find out. First thing you need to know is that I am going to put wax on
the arrowheads. I made a previous film about flexible armor and the question
was did putting wax on the arrowheads do
anything to their ability to penetrate flexible armour?
And the answer was 'yes' absolutely it did, it nearly doubled the depth
through flexible armor that these needle bobkins would pass. That is a massive
difference. There is absolutely no evidence at all medieval wise that
they did that, so why am i doing it? Is this some sort
of great cheat? Well I'll explain my thinking.
Our medieval forebears were very, very, good at observing
the result of their actions and then deciding whether to carry on or not.
As i've always said, they might not have had the words, but they were not stupid,
they understood what was going on around them in their world. If you take this
arrow here; they knew if they made the fletches
smaller and shorter the arrow would fly further.
They knew if they took the binding off the arrow would fly further.
They knew that if they bob tailed this; they tapered it all the way down to the
back from the front, it would go further. They knew all these
things. Right? They didn't have the science to tell them why,
they just worked it out. Another thing that they knew, was the arrows spun when
they were in the air and that helps a bent shaft go straighter. So
they could put their fletchings on helically, they could put their fletches
deliberately on at an angle and that makes the arrow spin more.
But look at this. This is a crossbow bolt, very typical of a
crossbow bolt from around 1400. It's got wooden fletches on it right
I've done another film about wooden fletches but we're not talking about
that today. Now look at that curve, that's a wing
section. 650 years before the Wright brothers
took their first flight, people were making crossbow bolts with
wing sections. They had no idea why that did it. It
worked and this is my thinking behind the wax.
Somebody at some point, dipped the arrowhead in wax, stop
corrosion, make an extra special treat for the customer, whatever it might have
been, and somebody came back to the smith and
just went 'you know what those arrowheads, 'boy they went through armour' and somebody
went 'ding!' there's an idea. And I bet every last
penny I've got, that in the medieval world they would
wax their arrowheads. That's my thinking, i've got no evidence,
but that's my take on it. So I'm going to wax the heads now the next point i'm
going to do is i'm going to run these tests
with all my samples on this stuff, which is just a roofing insulation.
What I want is a stable, homogenous, continuous, reliable backstop for my
material so I can test one thing against another thing
and this will provide that. Is it particularly hard to penetrate?
Well not enormously so, you know, oh nice noise!
It goes through, it's not enormously hard to penetrate,
so this will give me a good backstop. It's not ballistic gel
don't keep telling me it's not, but it will give me what I need which is the
comparator of one thing to another. Let's go shoot
something! I'm back down the range now with my four
arrow types and my rather sadly named lock down longbow.
I know but it does the job. One chronograph get some speed measurements
off it and a straw target. There is a section of
plywood and cardboard multi layers at the top, because if you shoot a barbed
head into a target you never get it out, so that allows me to get it out of that
one; so let's go.
First one up is the type seven. 177.5 feet per second. Next up the type 9
180.8 feet per second; does kick some. Next up is the m2
193.5, it's a bit lighter that one. And last up now is our type 16.
206.4. Just coming up to target now so you can see the bottom three there,
which have all gone in and are well out the other side, so again
you would not want to be struck by them that is for sure.
And then let's come up here you can just see my stack
of six layers of six mm/quarter inch plywood and cardboard
and let's see if it's done its job..... it feels like it has and then.....
yeah, there we go. So the type 16 has not come out the back face which is
exactly what we wanted but it looks like not too far from it I
would think. Slight update; that tiny little pimple there is in fact
the tip of the type 16 just poking out the back of that material stack
so again pretty impressive.
This data table her I'm flashing up shows all the information for the
different arrow types, but it's also duplicated in the notes, so
go and have a look for it there. My films are not rigorous scientific
experiments. They're really just me messing about, but
I'm honest about what I do and how I do it and I'm honest about the results I
show you and you can then interpret that however you want. But i'll say it again.
These arrows are the right dimensions, the right weights, they travel at the
right speeds, they even oscillate in the right kind of
way, I showed you that slow-mo footage there.
The target doesn't care what the arrow is shot out of,
it's what the arrow does and basically as far as
I can see this is pretty much indivisible from being launched from a
longbow even though i'm shooting it from my
rather rubbishy Chinese compound crossbow. That makes it very
easy now for me to be able to do these kind of
tests in the backyard and establish that basically
they are correct. So what's next for the lockdown longbow?
Shields! Will this protect you from an arrow? Will it stop it or will it just go
straight through your arm? I don't know! Let's find out. Properly
made shield against properly moving arrows. Let's do
it. Next episode.